Melissa Perri is a product management educator, author, speaker, and consultant. She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders.
Committed to that mission, she created the online school Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3500 students. Seeing an opportunity to help executives understand the value of Product Management, she published the book Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value, with O’Reilly Media. In 2019, she started a program to train the next generation of Chief Product Officers with Insight Partners and their 150 portfolio companies. Melissa was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business school to teach product management in the MBA program.
As the CEO of Produx Labs, Melissa runs a team of consultants who work with executives worldwide to set up their product organizations, advise on product strategy, and train leaders and team members. They have partnered closely with VCs to advise their companies on product growth strategy, hiring product leaders, and working with boards, as well as larger companies going through digital transformations. Scale-up clients include Bynder, CentralReach, Duco, VTS, Force Therapeutics, and Plated. Larger company clients include AthenaHealth, WoodMackenzie, Capital One, Lloyds Bank of England, Spotify, and Liberty Mutual.
Prior to her current position, Melissa was a Product Manager and UX Designer at Capital IQ, Barclays Capital, OpenSky, and Conductor.
Melissa is a highly sought after keynote speaker, having addressed audiences in over 35 countries. Past conferences include Mind the Product, Productized, Industry Conference, Agile Australia, Agile 2017, Lean UX NYC, Lean Agile Scotland, and QCon. In 2017 she was voted Best Product Person by The Product Group, a peer review award that received thousands of nominees worldwide.
Melissa has a degree in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University.
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How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
This book is a guide to getting out of the build trap with great product management. We look at what it means to become and be a product-led organization, which involves four key components:
- Creating a product manager role with the right responsibilities and structure
- Enabling those product managers with a strategy that promotes good decision making
- Understanding the process of determining what product to build, through experimentation and optimization
- Supporting everyone with the right organizational policies, culture, and rewards to allow product management to thrive
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